![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Testing: A History
Feb. 27th, 2021 08:39 pmWhen I was in fourth grade, my teacher stood in front of the class one day and introduced a Special Teacher. “She’s going to show you her big book of words,” our teacher said. “And you’re going to read them. It’s important to do your best.”
One by one, kids were called to the back of the classroom. They spent ten or fifteen minutes back there and returned to their desks. It seemed like no big deal, but I was still eager for my turn. A big book of words! To me that seemed like by far the most exciting thing that had happened since the day of the Worst Substitute Teacher, the one who showed us that, indeed, a teacher can just walk out in the middle of a day and never return, and there will be drama when he does.
Eventually, it was my turn. I inspected the setup with interest as the special teacher explained the process. The book of words was designed to stand up on its own, with the ring binding facing up, and the teacher said she would flip pages over so I could read the word on the page facing me. I prepared to Do My Best. She flipped the first page over.
The page was entirely blank except for one giant word: CAT. I looked at the word and tried to figure out what I could possibly be expected to do with it. I could not imagine any combination of “doing my best” and “just the word ‘cat’ by itself on the page” that made sense. I hesitated. Anagram? Hidden word? What was going on with this test?
“Can you tell me what word that is?” the teacher said, in a very gentle, sweet, encouraging tone. “Can you sound it out, maybe?”
“It just says cat,” I said helplessly.
“Good!” the teacher said, and flipped the page. I decided maybe there wasn’t a trick here.
We progressed to multiple words on the page. Then many words on the page. The teacher stopped saying “good!” after each word. She started having me skip words. A short time after that, she began making little huffy noises after I read the words to her. These seemed like potentially unhappy sounds, but she was still giving me new pages, and I knew I was reading them correctly, so I just kept on. I was Doing My Best!
The teacher began having me read just one randomly-chosen word per page. I continued to Do My Best.
Finally, the teacher looked at me over the top of the ring binder. “Have you taken this test before?” she said.
In the classroom, every other kid was packing up to go home.
“No,” I said. I was not very into this conversation thing; I just wanted to get back to the book of words.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Did someone give you words to memorize for this test?”
“No,” I said again.
She studied me for a minute as my classmates filed out the door. Then she said, “Try THIS,” and flipped to the very last page in the book.
Now, I need to explain here that my parents had a “read whatever you want and on your own head be it” policy with me, largely because it was extremely challenging to keep me in books (or, for that matter, away from books). Also, they had a collection of Erma Bombeck books that I was very into at that point. And one of my favorite sections of one of those books was about Bombeck’s attempts to provide sex education for her children via fish tanks. I had read it many times, and I had asked about the word in it that I didn’t know, and my father had helped me look it up in our giant unabridged dictionary.
So when the teacher told me to read a specific word on that last page, yes, I am sure there were ones that I didn’t know there, but the one she picked out, I read confidently. “Enceinte,” I said carefully, closing my eyes because the word was said nothing like it was spelled.
The teacher looked at me flatly. “There is no way you know that word,” she said.
“It means the wall of a fort or the inside part of a fort,” I told her, exactly as my father had told me, “but it used to be a euphemism for being pregnant.” (I knew all about euphemisms by that age, which is what happens when you have a father with a rich, varied vocabulary and zero interest in self-censorship. I also knew about, for example, bowdlerizing, which my father had explained to me several years before, along with the editorial comment that it was “fucking bullshit.”)
The special teacher said, in a very different tone than she previously had, “Good.” Then she slammed her book of words shut, picked it up, and stalked over to our teacher. “I am going to have to come back tomorrow,” she snarled. “Because SOMEONE took FOREVER because she had to be a SMARTY PANTS.” I was not great at people or feelings, but I sensed that, just possibly, the special teacher was mad at me.
My teacher looked over at me, now packing up my things, and sighed ruefully. “She’s one of our problems,” she said.
And so I learned two very important lessons:
One by one, kids were called to the back of the classroom. They spent ten or fifteen minutes back there and returned to their desks. It seemed like no big deal, but I was still eager for my turn. A big book of words! To me that seemed like by far the most exciting thing that had happened since the day of the Worst Substitute Teacher, the one who showed us that, indeed, a teacher can just walk out in the middle of a day and never return, and there will be drama when he does.
Eventually, it was my turn. I inspected the setup with interest as the special teacher explained the process. The book of words was designed to stand up on its own, with the ring binding facing up, and the teacher said she would flip pages over so I could read the word on the page facing me. I prepared to Do My Best. She flipped the first page over.
The page was entirely blank except for one giant word: CAT. I looked at the word and tried to figure out what I could possibly be expected to do with it. I could not imagine any combination of “doing my best” and “just the word ‘cat’ by itself on the page” that made sense. I hesitated. Anagram? Hidden word? What was going on with this test?
“Can you tell me what word that is?” the teacher said, in a very gentle, sweet, encouraging tone. “Can you sound it out, maybe?”
“It just says cat,” I said helplessly.
“Good!” the teacher said, and flipped the page. I decided maybe there wasn’t a trick here.
We progressed to multiple words on the page. Then many words on the page. The teacher stopped saying “good!” after each word. She started having me skip words. A short time after that, she began making little huffy noises after I read the words to her. These seemed like potentially unhappy sounds, but she was still giving me new pages, and I knew I was reading them correctly, so I just kept on. I was Doing My Best!
The teacher began having me read just one randomly-chosen word per page. I continued to Do My Best.
Finally, the teacher looked at me over the top of the ring binder. “Have you taken this test before?” she said.
In the classroom, every other kid was packing up to go home.
“No,” I said. I was not very into this conversation thing; I just wanted to get back to the book of words.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Did someone give you words to memorize for this test?”
“No,” I said again.
She studied me for a minute as my classmates filed out the door. Then she said, “Try THIS,” and flipped to the very last page in the book.
Now, I need to explain here that my parents had a “read whatever you want and on your own head be it” policy with me, largely because it was extremely challenging to keep me in books (or, for that matter, away from books). Also, they had a collection of Erma Bombeck books that I was very into at that point. And one of my favorite sections of one of those books was about Bombeck’s attempts to provide sex education for her children via fish tanks. I had read it many times, and I had asked about the word in it that I didn’t know, and my father had helped me look it up in our giant unabridged dictionary.
So when the teacher told me to read a specific word on that last page, yes, I am sure there were ones that I didn’t know there, but the one she picked out, I read confidently. “Enceinte,” I said carefully, closing my eyes because the word was said nothing like it was spelled.
The teacher looked at me flatly. “There is no way you know that word,” she said.
“It means the wall of a fort or the inside part of a fort,” I told her, exactly as my father had told me, “but it used to be a euphemism for being pregnant.” (I knew all about euphemisms by that age, which is what happens when you have a father with a rich, varied vocabulary and zero interest in self-censorship. I also knew about, for example, bowdlerizing, which my father had explained to me several years before, along with the editorial comment that it was “fucking bullshit.”)
The special teacher said, in a very different tone than she previously had, “Good.” Then she slammed her book of words shut, picked it up, and stalked over to our teacher. “I am going to have to come back tomorrow,” she snarled. “Because SOMEONE took FOREVER because she had to be a SMARTY PANTS.” I was not great at people or feelings, but I sensed that, just possibly, the special teacher was mad at me.
My teacher looked over at me, now packing up my things, and sighed ruefully. “She’s one of our problems,” she said.
And so I learned two very important lessons:
- They tell you to do your best on tests, but they don’t mean it.
- I was a Problem. (I already kind of knew this – there was a lot of evidence piling up – but this was the first time I had ever heard the word for it.)
